(a) Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a driving apparatus for a display device and a display device having the same.
(b) Description of the Related Art
Today, liquid crystal displays are one of the more widely used types of flat panel displays. A liquid crystal display has two display panels on which field generating electrodes, such as pixel electrodes and a common electrode, are formed and a liquid crystal layer that is interposed between the panels. In the liquid crystal display, a voltage is applied to the field generating electrodes to generate an electric field, and the alignment of liquid crystal molecules of the liquid crystal layer is determined by the electric field. Accordingly, the polarization of incident light is controlled, thereby displaying the desired image.
Meanwhile, the liquid crystal display includes display panels on which pixels (which include switching elements and display signal lines) are provided and a gate driver that transmits gate signals to gate lines among the display signal lines to turn on/off the switching elements of the pixels.
The gate driver is typically an integrated circuit (IC) type, and includes a shift register, a level shifter, and an output buffer. The shift register includes a plurality of stages that are connected to one another. Each stage sequentially generates an output, and the generated output is applied to the gate line through the level shifter and the output buffer.
A method has been suggested in which one pixel is divided into two subpixels that are capacitively coupled to each other. In this case, a voltage is directly applied to one subpixel, and a voltage drop occurs in the other subpixel by the capacitive coupling. Then the voltage varies between the two subpixels, and thus transmittance varies between the two subpixels.
The gate signals that are generated by the existing gate driver are broadly classified into two types of gate signals: gate signals that overlap to simultaneously turn on two subpixels in the same pixel row but do not overlap in different pixel rows, and gate signals that overlap in different pixel rows. However, there is no gate driver that can generate the two types of signals and thus gate drivers need to be separately manufactured for the two types of signals.